Back to School -OR- The Stupidest Time Travel Scheme Ever
by chris the cynic
Summary: After "So the Drama" Shego says that Eric was severely under-utilized and a long term mole would have been much better. Drakken decides that Shego would be perfect, he just has to age her down, send her back in time to before Kim and Shego originally met, and . . . it's a profoundly bad idea all around. But Shego accepts (for her own reasons.)


Notes up front. This picks up at Shego and Drakken's last scene in the _So the Drama_ movie.

It's inspired by a couple of barely-started-before-they-were-abandoned fics I've read and one complete but completely different (in all but some surface details) fic. It's a time travel AU, obviously, but in spite of the alternate title it is not, in fact, the stupidest time travel scheme possible, it's just monumentally unwise. The depths of stupidity contain time travel ideas far worse than the plan Drakken comes up with here. Or, short version, the alt-title is hyperbole.

~ ⁂ ~

 **Prologue**

They were in the last van. Shego wasn't entirely sure why they had saved Drakken for the last one, but she was still in pain from the reason she'd been placed with the final seven henchmen to be carted away: it had taken that long to dig her out from under the rubble of the control tower.

The EMTs had been positively amazed -to the point they wouldn't shut up about it- by the fact Shego wasn't dead five times over -once from the kick that turned her into a projectile with enough force to shatter the tower, once from the impact that did shatter the tower, once from the electricity that coursed through her body when she hit, once from the multi-story fall after she separated from the tower, and once from the tower landing on top of her. Their incessant ramblings about what she'd suffered did nothing to lighten Shego's mood.

The moment they gave the "Ok" to the police Shego had been loaded into the final van, only Drakken sat farther from the door than she did, in spite of her being the last one placed in the van.

"This is not over!" Drakken shouted in a particularly whiny voice. "Aw, this can't be over."

Shego just glared.

"Deal with it, dude," Stoppable said, slamming the door closed, "it's-"

The van sped away, but it wasn't hard to guess what Stoppable had been about to say.

They'd been traveling three hours, this was _not_ a time when they'd be thrown in a local jail, when Shego finally deinged to speak to Drakken.

"We could have won if you had bothered to _tell me the actual plan_."

"Shego?" Drakken's voice had nothing but confusion.

"Do you want a list?"

"Maybe?" Now there was fear.

"I didn't know we had a mole in her inner circle until you had me go to Middleton and even then it wasn't you who told me, it was the synthodrone. If I had known maybe he wouldn't have been so useless."

"Synthodrone 901 served his purpose," Drakken said defensively.

"He didn't keep her from learning about the plot, he didn't keep her from stopping it in Middleton, he didn't keep her from stopping it in general, and he didn't provide any useful intelligence. We had a spy who accomplished nothing."

"He wasn't a spy, he was a-"

"If he were a distraction then you shouldn't have had me bring him to our base of operations!" Shego snapped. "I could have taken him to the Caribbean lair, let a few clues slip, and she'd have thought that was our base of operations. When the signal actually went out she'd be stuck on an island and wouldn't have been able to reach our command tower _on a moped_."

"Well . . ." Drakken was back to fear.

"By the time a boat or plane got her passed the robots and back to the mainland we'd have been able to set up, at least, a secondary tower. Maybe even a tertiary one. Then she wouldn't be able to stop us just by taking out one tower."

"Multiple overlapping global control systems . . ." And now Drakken was being thoughtful.

He wasn't supposed to be thoughtful, he'd royally screwed this up.

"The only thing the synthodrone did was keep her mildly distracted for a short time and then deliver an electric shock. A shock that wouldn't have been necessary if you hadn't screwed up the planning stages."

"I don't-" And he was back to being afraid with just a hint of defensiveness. Good.

"It was never going to be enough to dangle a 'syntho-hottie' in front of her for an absurdly short period of time and think that that could keep her from listening to the buffoon when he found out you were using his _favorite restaurant_ as a part of your scheme.

"You didn't need to have everything on an accelerated time-frame just so you could threaten her prom date. If you were going to get someone close to her they should have been an agent who established a relationship with her over an extended period before the plan came to fruition.

"It didn't even need to be a date, we could have had an agent becoming her friend, made a few fake plots for her to foil while the the agent got close to her, worked on dividing loyalties and maybe sabotage that damned hair dryer grappling hook or something.

" _I_ could have done a better job than the synthodrone!"

Drakken's eyes seemed to light up. This was not good.

"What did you say?" he asked.

"It was just an example," Shego said, now _she_ was worried. "I don't do undercover and Kim hates me, which makes me a horrible choice for such a mission, but even with those two things against me I still could have done a better job than the drone did because he was just that bad."

"No, you're right," Drakken said. Shego could tell from the way he said it that this wasn't the good kind of being right. New schemes were developing inside of his mind and they were the worst type of scheme there could be: ones that used her.

Not included her; _used_ her.

"You would be perfect."

"Drakken," Shego said in a voice that would make any normal person run for cover.

"You could become her friend, do girl things with her that the buffoon never would, since you're her equal in combat you could join her on missions as a partner rather than sidekick, rendering the buffoon and his rodent obsolete, you could become essential to every aspect of her life so that she came to depend on you without even realizing it, and then, at the critical moment, KABOOM!

"This is so much better than a made to order syntho-hottie."

This was a disaster.

It was time to change tack.

"Do you want me to tell you why that won't work?" Shego asked in a civil voice.

"But it will work!" Drakken shouted in glee.

"You already tricked her into liking a new acquaintance. She'll be suspicious. She's known me since she took your nano-tick, so there'll be no convincing her I'm not her enemy. I graduated from college with a two year degree in child development-"

"Why didn't you tell me you had a degree in that?" Drakken asked. "You could have helped with my research."

"The slumber parties were not research," Shego said, "and my point is that I can't pass as a high school student."

"Oh but you can," Drakken said in a way that truly disturbed Shego. "And you'll soon see that all of your concerns are easily dealt with."

"The electricity confounded my powers," Shego said, completely serious now; "if I try to use them I could very well vaporize the entire van along with us inside of it."

"I fail to see-"

"If you don't abandon this line of reasoning," Shego said, "I'll risk it in the hopes that I can beat you until you've been knocked into a different train of thought."

"But Shego, this was the closest we've ever come to world domination and you're right that you'd do a much better j-"

Blinding green light filled the van.

⁂

"They got away!?" Possible asked.

"Isn't it traditional to actually go to prison before breaking out?" Stoppable asked.

"Shego!" Drakken called, pulling her attention away from the screen on which she was watching the intercepted conversation.

"Shego, the time has come to tell you of my greatest scheme yet."

"Are your burns even healed yet?" Shego asked.

"Enough of that," Drakken said quickly. "Walk with me."

She sighed and followed him through their traditional fallback lair: the Caribbean lair.

"Shego, what do you know about time travel?" Drakken said.

"I hate time travel," Shego said reflexively.

"But do you know why?" Drakken asked in a very smug way.

Of course she knew why, she hated time travel because . . . because . . .

"Last year, in late summer, there were ripples through space-time that I have determined were a result of a failed attempt to change the world via time travel-"

"Is this going somewhere?"

"Whatever happened was so paradoxical that it effectively wrote itself out of the space time continuum but echos of the experience lingered with a select few individuals," Drakken said. "Strong feelings that seemed to come from nowhere. You yourself ended up disliking time travel, while I developed an irrational fear of control collars-"

"What?"

"They don't exist yet," Drakken said with a wave his hand. Then he added, "And I hope they never will," with a shudder.

"Ok . . ." Shego said.

"Because of your sudden distaste for time travel I shelved the work I'd done on the space-time ripples-"

Shego didn't believe that, so she asked, "Like you gave up on cloning after I told you, 'No cloning'?"

"Fine," Drakken said as if he'd just been forced to make some major concession. "I couldn't find a way to use time travel to our advantage without inevitably causing a paradoxical collapse, especially since I was only able to locate half of the item that served as a locus for the temporal distortions.

"I can only safely send one person through time and even with minimal equipment that person would have to weigh one hundred and fifteen pounds or less. That rather limits any grand schemes."

Shego knew she didn't want to know, but curiosity compelled her to ask anyway, "So why are you bringing this up now?"

"Your idea of a long term sleeper agent has made me reconsider the possibilities that are available to us."

Shego recognized this as very not good, believed that Drakken's burns from the van incident must not have been severe enough, and was very eager for her powers to stop being on the fritz so she could properly dissuade him from this line of reasoning.

"It is true that Kim Possible would wary of new friends now, it's true that she's been able to recognize us since first meeting us, and it's true that you're too old to be a high school student."

And it was true that Shego had an immense sinking feeling.

"Before she met us, however, she had no reason to be suspicious, she wouldn't recognize us, and once I've used my juvinator to make you the appropriate age . . . well, more than half of all 15 year old girls weigh less than 115 pounds."

"You're planning to send me to _high school_ for two years?" Shego asked. Drakken took a step back. He seemed to finally be getting a sense of her mood. She could always beat him with her bare fists. She didn't need powers to beat him up.

"Now, Shego . . ." Drakken said while speeding his backward motion.

⁂

In the end, Shego was convinced, but not by Drakken. Part of the equipment that could be sent back with her was a small handheld computer with positively amazing storage capacity, and she'd carefully decided what to load onto it. The in depth history of every stock market on the planet, digital copies of every single book that was made after her arrival and every patent that had been granted or applied for, winning lottery numbers, archaeological finds, so on, so forth. She didn't need a a computer to record the locations of a plethora of priceless objects that were being protected by security that was, to her, out-dated by a bit over two years.

Everything would be thrown off track fast, the only winning numbers she could count on were the first ones, releasing a runaway bestseller before the real author even wrote it would shake up the literary world, it would be difficult to tell how long she could play stocks before the market completely changed, archaeological finds wouldn't be a problem, though getting either a fence or legitimate permits might.

Drakken's limited time travel would only allow her to go back to early December 2001 -Shego considered this a very good thing as it meant she'd only have to endure half of freshman year- and by that Christmas she'd be so rich she wouldn't know what to do with the money.

Drakken thought she wanted the schematics for his holo-technology to create fictitious parents for her cover. In fact she needed it so that when she won every lottery on the planet the people who sold her the tickets, and the people who gave her the jackpots, would see adults instead of a 15 year old girl. Different adults because if the same adult won everything people would be suspicious. Same reasoning for books and inventions.

She'd convinced Drakken that she'd need to able to be _inside_ of the of the holograms sometimes because people would expect the "parents" to be able to touch things, and he'd come through for her on that point. So no worries about physically picking up the tickets, shaking hands, or anything like that.

Shego was a thief, and she was about to steal a lot of people's futures . . . pasts . . . whatever; she really did hate time travel. Still, it would be the greatest job she ever pulled. The only problem was that Drakken would be able to stay in contact with her, and yank her back if he felt she was betraying him, so she'd need to also go through the motions of his stupid plan.

Well, that wasn't the only problem. Even if she could cut herself off from Drakken, the juvinator couldn't go back with her, meaning she'd be stuck as a teenager. Still, the past would be her playground, and Drakken had rigged up something to let her know how much change was too much, so she didn't have to worry about the universe getting fed up with her changes and spitting her out.

So it was that before summer's end in 2004, Shego was sent back to early December of 2001.

~ ⁂ ~

End notes:

Time travel, the echoes, and the "juvinator" are from the movie a _A Sitch in Time_.

"Echoes" is the term I'm using for things like Ron's "I hate meatcakes" moment at the end of _A Sitch in Time_. Shego's comment, "I hate time travel," (which happened during the collapsed timeline) was nowhere near as strong as Ron's aversion to meatcakes, but -since the entire movie is one giant paradox involving future Shego's meddling- one has to assume that Shego has been doing more time travel than _anyone_ else in the setting, and by the end absolutely none of it worked out in her favor so I figured, "Why not?"

Most of what Shego says is just poking holes in his _So the Drama_ scheme. There's nothing precisely indicating how long Eric was present, but it didn't appear to be that long (more of a "sweep Kim off her feet" thing than an "actually build a relationship" thing), during his time with Kim he did basically _nothing_ to advance Drakken's plan, and rather than use Kim's inevitable (and foreseen by Drakken) rescue attempt to keep her away from his weak point, Drakken's clumsy use of Eric actually got her moving there even faster (and in an untested prototype battle-suit that she might otherwise have left behind.)

Shego's outline of a plan for a longer term sleeper agent who can get close, gather intelligence, do potentially do sabotage, divide loyalties, and so forth would make for a decent evil plot. Adding time travel to the mix pretty well ruins said plot. Send someone to a place where they're completely isolated, have them attempt to become friends with the target, simmer for two years, then have them betray the person who was actually there for them over the past two years in favor of someone who was contacting them intermittently through a temporal communicator. What could possibly go wrong?

The attempt to avoid catastrophic paradoxical collapse means that once she's in the past Shego won't be making contact with the contemporary Drakken, Shego, or . . . anyone else she knows. That leaves three seasons worth of pretending to be Kim's friend while completely cut off from the rest of the villainous world, and in that time she can't actively work to sabotage Kim because that might change things too much. She can, according to Drakken's theory, _help_ Kim because Kim was going to win all of her anti-villain fights anyway. So for all that time she's befriending, not hurting, and possibly helping her enemy. That time, by the way, covers the entire original run of the series before fans got it un-cancelled for Season 4. (I mention this because this long after the fact it's easy for me to forget that Season 4 was originally never supposed to happen.)

Again, Shego was not convinced by Drakken's actual plan, it's just something she'll endure in order to use time travel to get absurdly rich with minimal effort. Granted she only has two years worth of stuff to work with, not like in _Life After_ where there's a quarter century, but she can still do things like have the design for the most iconic Blackberry a year early and sell the design for the chip from _Adventures in Rufus Sitting_ well before it is actually supposed to be designed.

God, I'm rambling in my end notes. At least I'm writing something. I have been stalled for so damned long. I'm kind of hoping that getting into Kim Possible again with this will help get me unstalled on _Forgotten Seeds_ (which has been next on my things to do list for _ages_ ), _Being more than a Simulacrum_ , _Life After_ , _Bent, not Broken_ , and _Fusion_.


End file.
